Echoes

It would perhaps be easy to post a beautiful landscape photograph each day as I travel around the New Zealand’s magnificent south island. However, while the stirring grandeur of this wild terrain is undoubtedly photogenic, I like finding the beauty in scenes others might pass by or not even notice.

This morning, after leaving my overnight camp spot overlooking a river that wound its way through a gush green valley, I came upon a field with a dozen or so old vehicles sat there just rusting away.

These old cars and trucks with their flared wheel arches and split screen windshields were automotive echoes from an era when cars were not the generic mass transport they are today.

Once these were all gleaming new cars of all different colors, imports from America I suspect. But now, here in this boneyard of a bygone era, they shared the same shades of rust that nature has given them over the years.

I photographed each one, taking time to examine it and imagine who would have driven a car like this. All traces of their owners had vanished, leaving nothing to connect their present with their past. Could any of the cars I’ve owned be sitting in a field somewhere? Somehow I doubt it, though a part of me kind of hopes there is.